CORDEAUX: LINCOLNSHIRE AGRICULTURE, 321 
The East, West, and Wildmore Fens contained 40,000 acres, 
much of which was sid partially drained and converted into 
rough pasturage. Wildmore was a vast waste, with hundreds of 
acres of thistles and nettles a feet high. Thirty parishes had the 
right of pasturage in these fens, the common right being worth 
2s. 10d. per acre. In Wildmore, the thistles were in such enormous 
quantities that a common complaint of the sheep was sore noses, 
which, ulcerating, prevented them feeding, so that numbers died. 
In the summer, Wildmore had been known to carry five sheep to 
the acre, besides horses and young cattle, with enormous flocks of 
geese ; three geese being equal in grazing to one sheep. 
In 1793, 40,000 sheep, or one to the acre, died of rot in these 
three fens. The number also stolen before the enclosure was 
incredible, whole flocks disappearing. 
Beyond the fens and sea marshes came the desolate coast, where 
there were thousands of acres of salt fitties capable of embankment 
and reclamation. 
In both the East and Wildmore Fens, the poor horses, called 
‘Wildmore tits,’ got on the ice in winter, and were ‘ screeved’; 
that is, their legs spreading Carnes the wretched animals 
got split. 
In Deeping Fen, we are told, the mice (doubtless, the hott 
tailed field mouse) had multiplied to such a degree in the pastures 
as almost to starve the sheep. The land was alive with them, so 
that a certain Mr. Greaves, in a field of a few acres, killed eight or 
ten by his horse treading on them. 
Immense flocks of geese were kept in the fens. These were 
plucked four, or sometimes five, times. The feathers of a dead 
goose were worth 6d. In Wildmore, plucked geese paid in feathers 
annually one shilling a head. Some owners winged them only once 
a quarter, taking ten feathers from each goose, making five shillings 
a thousand—six score to the hundred. This was long before the 
days of steel pens. There was nothing to prevent a cottager renting 
five pounds a year, and who only had a cow and a few sheep, 
running 1,500 to 2,000 breeding geese on the common lands. 
In 1798, much of the grazing land in the marsh was occupied by 
men who lived on the wolds ; but before the enclosure of these, the 
farming aristocracy dwelt in the marsh and middle marsh. The 
ce notissioner was told, that within the last forty years, four four- 
Wheeled carriages were kept by great graziers living at Theddle- 
thorpe, then deserted. In fact, we have only to see the number of 
fine old Churches in the marsh, to understand how much larger the 
Population must at one time have been. 
a Novy, 1895, 
